Survival Impossible Without Habitat

January 2, 2001

The prospects of cloning an extinct species back into existence may be exciting science, but it's no panacea for making the world safe for animals and plants while their natural habitats continue to disappear at alarming rates.

That is the dilemma facing "Celia," the name of the clone scientists from the United States and Spain hope to create that will mark the second coming of the bucardo, a mountain goat that had vanished from the face of the Earth.

Pity poor Celia. Like her cloned predecessors, much will be made of her existence. The question is where will she and others like her ultimately go, when their natural environment in the Pyrenees continues to be threatened by habitat destruction, hunting, landslides and pollution?

Cloning is a fact of life. Dolly, the famously cloned sheep, proved that. Now, scientists believe the same tools that created Dolly can be used to shore up the numbers of many endangered species. In fact, the firm that is cloning Celia has already cloned a gaur, an endangered humpback relative of the cow from Southeast Asia.

Celia would be the first clone of an extinct species, a development that has staggering implications that stretch the imagination into the realm of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park.

In the bucardo's case, scientists are cloning one of the cells of the remains of a mountain goat that was crushed to death by a tree that fell last January in northern Spain.

Over the years, hunting and habitat pressures drove the bucardo into the remote highlands of the Pyrenees. The Spanish government tried to save it, but the last male bucardo died in 1991. Celia was the last female, but researchers had extracted some of its tissue before it died. If the tissue can be cloned in the egg of a common ibex, the bucardo would live again.

By manipulating frozen cells, mankind could bring back some bygone species to shore up the food chain of other animals and help protect Earth's biodiversity. Unfortunately, it's not that easy. Revival through cloning isn't enough.

The human species must do a far better job of protecting the planet's endangered environments. Pollution and the loss of natural habitats to farmland and development remain the biggest threats to those animals and plants unfortunate enough to be classified as endangered species.

Modern science may have the tools to revive a species, but the attempt to restock will do little good unless mankind becomes a better steward in maintaining this world's natural habitats.